INTC Tops Oracle in Market Cap as Foundry Rerating Extends

Day Two Of The Foundry Rerating

The HIP-3 perp added another 10.24% over 24 hours to $110.9 as the cash stock extended to fresh all-time highs and Intel's market cap passed Oracle for the first time. This is day two of the move that started Monday off Bloomberg's report that Apple is in early-stage talks with Intel Foundry — and Samsung in parallel — to make processors for U.S.-bound devices. No contract has been signed and the talks are exploratory, but the bid has not faded a single session. Sell-side consensus mean target still sits below $80 with the tape printing above $110, and that disconnect is what 24/7 Wall St framed as a 14% short-squeeze leg into the headline.

The Stack Behind The Bid

Apple is the headline, but the rerating runs deeper than one report. Intel announced a Tesla 14A foundry deal on May 2 and joined Elon Musk's Terafab on April 7 — the latter alone helped shares climb 115% in April. On top of that sit an expanded Alphabet partnership for AI infrastructure, a $5 billion Nvidia equity investment, a $5.7 billion CHIPS Act disbursement, and a 9.9% U.S. government equity stake from fall 2025. Q1 2026 data center revenue grew 22% year-over-year. CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took the seat in early 2025, has spent the last twelve months turning the foundry pitch from a slide deck into a customer list. The market is pricing the Apple report as the validation event for that thesis, not the standalone catalyst — which is why the print extended a second day instead of fading.

What The Bears Still Have

The fundamentals have not caught the tape. Intel's most recent quarter still printed a $4.28 billion net loss, the trailing P/E sits north of 900, and the daily RSI is deep in overbought territory. The Apple talks themselves remain exploratory — chip qualification cycles run years, no order has been placed, and Apple may ultimately stay at TSMC or pivot to Samsung. For perp traders, the asymmetric risk now sits on the downside: any headline that downgrades the talks from "early-stage" to "stalled" hits a name that is already up roughly 170% year-to-date with crowded long positioning at all-time highs and a 10x-leveraged perp on top.